Chapter 81: THE WOLF'S WIDOW'S VIGIL

The road to Tulln ran gray between gray fields, the snow melted just enough to show the stubble beneath, as if the earth itself were a widow lifting her hem to wade through mud. Konrad rode with his father's letter against his breast and the wolf's-head ring cutting into his finger beneath his glove. He had not slept since the chapel. The river's voice followed him anyway, a murmur beneath the hoofbeats, patient as a creditor.

He reached the convent at dusk. It was not the grand abbey of his imagining but a low, walled compound of brick gone soft with age, its chapel bell tolling the hour of vespers as he dismounted. A lay sister with a face like a dried apple took his reins and said nothing. He asked for the child Agnes. The sister looked at him the way one looks at weather that might turn.

"You are late," she said. "She has been asking for her father since the snow began."

That stopped him. "Her father."

"She says he is coming. She says a man with a wolf on his hand will come and take her to the boy." The sister's eyes went to his glove. "You had best come in before the gate closes."

They put him in a cold parlor with a crucifix and a brazier of coals that gave more smoke than heat. He waited. The bell stopped. Somewhere deeper in the cloister, women's voices chanted the office, thin and tuneless, like wind through a cracked shutter. Then a door opened, and a woman came in carrying a candle, and behind her, half-hidden in the folds of her gown, a girl.

She was small for seven, with his father's jaw and his mother's gray eyes. She looked at him without fear. The woman set the candle on the table and folded her hands. She was not old, but her face had been weathered by grief the way stone is weathered by rain. He knew her at once from the tapestry, from the letters, from every story Hedwig had not told him.

"Lady Agnes," he said. The name was his grandmother's. It was also his sister's.

"I am no lady," she said. "I am the widow of a man who died in a cellar with his throat opened, and I have kept his daughter alive on convent bread and the charity of nuns who think I am a penitent. You may call me what you like. The child calls me mother."

The girl stepped forward and looked up at him. "You have the ring," she said. "I dreamed it. The wolf is eating the lion."

Konrad knelt, which he had not planned to do. The coals spat. "Agnes," he said. "What else did you dream?"

"That the river remembers," she said, "and that you would come before the thaw." She put out her small hand and touched the ring through his glove, and he felt the cold of it pass into his bones. "Will you take me to Peter?"

The widow made a sound, not quite a word. Konrad looked up at her. "She knows about Peter."

"She knows everything I know," the widow said. "I have told her nothing but the truth, because lies rot the soul, and I have enough rot in mine. She knows she has a brother in Vienna and a father in the ground and an uncle who wears a crown and an aunt who wears a wolf. She knows that men came here in the autumn asking questions, and that I sent them away with a story about a dead child and a grave in the orchard." Her hands tightened on each other. "Hedwig came in the spring. She told me you would come. She said you would be either the saving of us or the end of us, and that I was to judge which."

"And which am I?"

"I have not decided." The widow moved to the brazier and held her hands over it, and the flames threw her shadow large against the wall. "Ottokar's men know about the boy. They do not know about the girl. That is the only coin I have left, and I will not spend it on a man who wears the Habsburg ring and speaks with a Habsburg tongue until I know what he intends."

Konrad rose. The child still held the edge of his glove. "Ottokar offered me a bargain," he said. "Peter's life, the letter's destruction, my service. He gave me until dawn. I did not answer him. I rode here instead."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted to see her face before I decided." He looked down at Agnes, who was watching him with an attention that was not childlike at all. "Because my father died for a crown he never wore, and I have spent ten years being told that was justice."

The widow was silent a long moment. Then she said, "Hedwig left something with me. She said to give it to you only if you came without the king's men, without a retinue, without a writ. You came alone."

"I came alone."

She went to the crucifix and lifted it from its nail—the whole cross, which swung open on a hidden hinge to reveal a hollow in the wall behind. From it she drew a roll of parchment sealed with gray wax and a small iron key, black with age. "The key opens the chest beneath the ash tree at Eppenstein," she said. "Hedwig said you had already buried something there. She said this opens what your father buried before you were born. She said the river remembers, and the ash tree keeps." She held them out. "And she said to tell you that the man who wears your face was seen in Vienna three days ago, entering the house of merchants' wool."

Konrad took the key and the scroll. The wax bore no seal he knew—not the Habsburg lion, not the Přemyslid eagle, but a wolf's head, identical to the ring. "Who made this seal?"

"Your father," the widow said. "Before you were born."

Above them the bell began to toll again, not vespers but the alarm, three strokes and a pause, three strokes and a pause. The lay sister burst into the parlor without knocking, her dried-apple face white. "Riders on the road," she said. "Six of them. Bohemian colors."

The widow snatched Agnes up and pressed her against her breast. "There is a postern in the orchard wall," she said. "Take the child. I will hold them here."

"You will not."

"I have held them before." She thrust the girl at him. "Go. If they find her, they will use her against the boy, and against you. Go now, and remember that I judged you, and I judged you worth the risk."

He took Agnes. She was light as a bird and did not cry. At the door he looked back. The widow was already moving toward the gate, her hands empty, her head high, and the candle behind her threw her shadow across the stones like a banner.

The postern let them out into an orchard of bare trees, and beyond it the river, black and quick under the last light. He carried the child along the bank until he found a fisherman's skiff half-drawn up on the mud, and he set her in it and pushed off, and the current took them. Behind them, over the wall, he heard a man's voice raised in question and a woman's voice answering, calm as a gate closing.

Agnes sat in the bow with her hands in her lap, watching him row. After a while she said, "She will be all right. She always is."

Konrad said nothing. His father's letter was wet against his breast, and the gray-sealed scroll was in his belt, and the key was cold in his hand, and somewhere downstream Vienna waited with a boy who had his father's eyes, and a double who wore his face, and a lion who thought it owned him.

The river carried them south, and the snow began again, and the ash tree's roots went on remembering.